…what a missionary must be ready to undergo in a foreign country is highly instructive. To find oneself alone in a great city, without a single friend or acquaintance, without provision of any kind, whether it be physical equipment or the support and security one derives from ordinary human relationships; to be poor even as far as language is concerned, unable to express oneself, to tell people what one is, what one knows; always to be in a position of inferiority, a child just learning to speak, contemptuously dismissed in every discussion, painfully aware of the poor impression one is always making, and of the pity, or else the hostility, with which one is regarded – all this brings home to a person better than empty theorizing what poverty, in the radical sense of dis-possession, really means. Not only does it take away external attachments, it makes one truly humble of heart; for to be poor is to be humiliated, and it is from being humiliated that one learns humility.How true. What we missionaries need above all is humility, the recognition that we are not the saviors of the world (nor even of the town we work in). We do not have all the answers, nor do we have the solutions to the problems around us. If we are really honest, we will recognize that we live among others who are as good as we are and have many deficiencies as we do. We are brothers and sisters in grace and in sin. And we will find joy in sharing the sorrows and joys of the people around us.
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The photo of Father Arrupe is taken from the page of the Jesuits in Argentina and Uruguay which has a good article on his life and witness in Spanish, found here.
The photo of me was taken before Mass in Dulce Nombre de María a few weeks ago.
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